Season 2 of Netflix’s quirky, wry, wonderfully humane Orange Is the New Black is completely different. Well, maybe not completely. The series, created by Jenji Kohan, still takes place in a women’s minimum security prison, still features the same lively rogues gallery of mostly well-meaning ne’er-do-wells, and still melds delight and dread to create one of the most interesting, idiosyncratic tones on television. In that regard, season 2 is the same as season 1.

But something fundamental is different. Season 1 lead Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling, who keeps getting better and better) has lost a little bit of the spotlight. It’s not that she’s been pushed back, exactly; it’s that the other characters around her have been pulled forward. In season 2, Orange Is the New Black becomes a true ensemble series, and the results are thrilling. No other show on television (as much as this show is “on television”) gives such vibrant, varied life to a cast of characters this diverse. And not just diverse in the obvious, and important, ways of skin color and ethnicity and sexual identity.

As the series judiciously uses its flashback structure to fill in the whys of these women’s lives, we’re confronted with an array of socioeconomic, political, and emotional realities that makes every character, even small ones, feel truly distinct, and human. The dehumanizing nature of prisons, and the way that “convict” can come to trump all other defining characteristics, is certainly explored in the series, and it’s a woeful, scary thing to watch. But more excitingly, Kohan and her writers also look at how life flourishes and begins to boldly, starkly define itself in restriction. Prison isn’t exactly good for these women, but it does something to their essences, states them more loudly and forwardly than otherwise might be the case. And that’s fascinating to watch.

It’s made all the more fascinating by a terrific cast. It’s a sprawling ensemble, and nearly everyone is fantastic, but there are a few particular standouts so far in season 2 (I’ve seen six episodes) that are worth singling out. Selenis Leyva, playing Gloria, the new queen of the kitchen with a tenuous grasp on her kingdom, is a beguiling mix of intelligence and toughness, though she lets a few glimmers of hurt break through at certain key moments. Danielle Brooks, who plays the ambitious but societally thwarted Taystee, has a wonderful, heartbreaking backstory that is better illuminated in season 2, and Brooks plays it in ways both subtle and gregarious. She’s a burst of life and energy in every scene she’s in, which is why I suspect she’s in so many this season. I’m also quite fond of Yael Stone as Lorna, whose sad and creepy backstory reveals her to be perhaps one of the more troubled characters we’ve come to know in the prison. It doesn’t mean we love her any less, though.

No worthy review of season 2 would be complete without mentioning a wonderful new character. That would be Vee, played by the great Lorraine Toussaint. I don’t want to spoil exactly who Vee is, but I can safely say that she’s a powerful new player on the scene. She’s calculating and cold, but, as played by a restrained but fully present Toussaint, never entirely a monster. That’s something I love about this show, that no character is exactly as you’d expect, or as easy to parse as they could have been on another, lazier dark comedy about prison.

Characters on Orange Is the New Black speak English, Spanish, German, Russian. They come from poverty and wealth and some hard-to-define place in between. Whether this accurately represents real-life prison populations is certainly up for debate. But at least this is a show—the rare, rare show—that is deeply committed to giving us a thoughtful and thorough, especially thorough this season, look at the lives of a vast range of different women. Women in the context of themselves and of the broader world, women who live under someone else’s thumb but who have nonetheless created their own complex society of rules and order and economy. It’s not exactly a metaphor for how women function in the “real world,” but it’s something approaching profound.

The series is sexy, and silly, and funny, and gross, and sad, and bleak, and bountiful. It’s all things, like life. Sometimes its quirkiness can get the better of it (though, thankfully, there is so far nothing in season 2 as dopey as that magic chicken from season 1), but for the most part this is a series whose lovingly, but not preciously, rendered humanity wins the day, episode after episode. What a revolution that feels like.

Of course, things could go off the rails in the latter half of the season. But from what I’ve seen so far, this is a show that’s learned from its first-season mistakes and gracefully broadened and yet honed its scope for its second outing. The storylines are subtler, the pacing more relaxed, and the humor less arbitrarily cruel and jagged. (That’s a good thing. We don’t want this turning into Weeds on us.) Piper is still our most-followed character, but so many more people are allowed to fully exist this season too—even sadsack prison guards. The world of the show is as finely realized as any of the Great Television of the past decade, but its aims are decidedly less grandiose (some might even say less pretentious) than many of those series. Orange Is the New Black is, at root, just a show about people, trying to survive and, if they can, thrive. It’s not always possible, but they more than make their mark in all the glorious trying.